#the assonance between the three of them still weirds me out but!

[seance]

HAPPY NAMES REVELATION DAY!

[omophagias]

What makes the 14th century alliterative revival interesting to you? If I can ask?

(i’m going to do the best i can to answer this while every piece of premodern lit i own is taped up in a box somewhere. this post is also going to be very long because it’s my blog and i do what i want.)

first of all i just like alliteration in any form of poetry—i think it makes it more fun to read out loud and helps to accentuate and drive along the meter. it’s also the primary ornamental device in old english poetry—i think the ruin provides a pretty good ongoing example although the translation they’re using on wikipedia is a bit lackluster imo. the ruin is also interesting in itself for a variety of reasons but i’m personally a fan of the way the alliteration seems to ebb and flow in intensity throughout the poem as the poet moves between the city as it once was and the ruins that it is now. it’s also got a bit of internal rhyme near the start with the repetition of -orene words—gehrorene, scorene, gedrorene, forweorone, geleorene (undereotone if you squint)—that i love. this is largely beside the point. anyway it looks like this—

glædmod ond goldbeorht  ||  gleoma gefrætwed, wlonc ond wingal  ||  wighyrstum scan; seah on sinc, on sylfor,  ||  on searogimmas, on ead, on æht,  ||  on eorcanstan, on þas beorhtan burg  ||  bradan rices. (the ruin, lines 33-37) 

broadly, the rule is: four stresses per line, at least three of which alliterate (wlonc ond wingal  ||  wighyrstum scan; or, more widely known and a bit looser, hwæt! we gar-dena  ||  in gear-dagum...)

anyway post-conquest a lot of things change; partially because english isn’t the prestige language for a couple-three centuries afterwards so prestige poetry is in latin or norman french (or anglo-norman), partially because english itself is obviously changing through absorbing a lot of norman & otherwise-french influence, partially it is the nature of poetic form to adapt. i’ve seen some arguments that end-rhyme was introduced into french-etc. poetry through diffusion of arabic poetry out of al-andalus; i’m not qualified to comment but it sounds plausible. either way, at and after the time of conquest, french verse was generally octosyllabic, and rhyming or at least assonant—

Bels fut li vespres e li soleilz fut clers. Les dis mulez fait Carles establer. El’ grant vergier fait li reis tendre un tref; Les dis messages ad fait enz hosteler; Duze serjant les unt bien cunreez. (la chanson de roland, att. turold, c. 1040–1115, lines 157-161; assonant)

Quant des lais faire m’entremet, ne vueil ubliër Bisclavret. Bisclavret a nun en Bretan, Garulf l’apelent li Norman. (bisclavret, marie de france, c. 1160–1215, lines 1-4; aabb rhyming)

alliterative verse didn’t entirely disappear, probably, but we don’t have evidence for it after the composition of layamon’s brut in 1190. the verse compositions in identifiable english that we have, like of arthour and of merlin or richard coer de lyon, tend to take after anglo-norman and french antecedents—

Merlin seyd to þe king “Al y knowe þi glosing, Y wot þou louest par amour Ygerne þat swete flour. What wiltow ȝeue me, ar tomorwe Y schal þe lese out of þi sorwe?” (of arthour and of merlin, c. 1250–1300, lines 2477-2482)

He answeryd wiþ herte ffree, “Þeron j moot avyse me. Ȝe weten weel, it is no lawe, A kynge to hange and to drawe…” (richard coer de lyon, c. 1300, lines 997-1000)

the above two are fairly representative of earlier (like, pre-chaucerian) middle english poetic literature. speaking broadly: short, metrical rhymed couplets. i should also mention, probably, that people at the time were fairly inconsistent about the scribal difference between u and v or y/i/j, that þ goes “th”, and that ȝ makes a variety of “g” or “g”-“y” cusp or “gh” or “ch” sounds and can also stand in scribally for a z or hard s.

anyway, the 14th century alliterative revival is what it sounds like: around 1350, primarily in the north and west of england, a lot of alliterative verse began to be written down. it’s…very different from the examples given above:

And þat þe myriest in his muckel þat myȝt ride; For of bak and of brest al were his bodi sturne, Both his wombe and his wast were worthily smale, And alle his fetures folȝande, in forme þat he hade, ful clene;      For wonder of his hwe men hade,      Set in his semblaunt sene;      He ferde as freke were fade,      And oueral enker-grene. (sir gawain and the green knight, “gawain poet”, c. 1370–1390, lines 142-150)

middle english alliterative verse by and large rejects end-rhyming (however, the exceptions to that rule are absolutely my favorites—more later), and brings back the four-stress line (both his wombe and his wast  ||  were worthily smale) although in a longer and looser form than was common in old english, probably because of linguistic shifts and because of evolution of the medium. it is so fun to read out loud. sir gawain and the alliterative morte arthure are probably your most accessible examples—they’re both available in facing-page translation by simon armitage, who isn’t my favorite translator of sir gawain but does a good job of retaining the stresses. piers plowman is also representative, but reading it, to me, is a little like being trapped in the donut shop my grandpa hangs out at with a bunch of other old guys, except without donuts—it’s very old-man-yells-at-cloud. but really my interest with them is less with translation than with the way that the language sits in my mouth, and the way that i think alliterative verse sort of pulls the lines forward in a way that end-rhyme doesn’t necessarily—it feels more propulsive, more churning. it’s like a water-wheel, if that makes sense? it plays off the natural stresses of the english language in a really engaging way, and differently from iambic pentameter, which tends to get most of the spotlight when it comes to naturalistic rhythm in english poetry. and there’s a playfulness to a lot of it (especially the rhymed poems), or at least a sense of the ability to play with language, that i love and that i think a lot of people don’t really realize existed in medieval literature (or think only chaucer was capable of it.)

however! the works from the alliterative revival that combine alliteration and end-rhyme are some of my favorite poems in the english language (for a permissive definition of “english”), because they tend to develop these incredible complex, elaborate structures of rhyme and meter. so there are two poems in this category that i’m going to talk about, and i can go for…a long time on the second one. i’m not really going to bring up sir gawain on its own much more because, no room, but it’s really one of my favorite arthurian works, in part because of the alliterative verse, in part because i just love the figure of the green knight and the awful castle hautdesert threesome setup; it’s also one of the more accessible examples of the core of the genre (at least to me—i bounced really hard off of malory, the mabinogion is fun but deeply weird in a way that might put off beginners, and i think chrétien de troyes really depends on how you’re introduced—english translations of french arthuriana tend to be prose translations, which is a whole different post but suffice it to say i don’t think they work.)

first is the three dead kings, which is an expansion on the “as you are so i once was / as i am so shall you be” type of memento mori motif that was pretty common at the time; three kings on a boar hunt run into three corpses who identify themselves as their ancestors and tell them to stop fucking around and take death seriously. so, thematically—i think memento mori art and literature is a lot of fun, in general; the combination of the focus on life’s transience with macabre and often enthusiastically ghoulish imagery—

Lo, here the wormus in my wome — thai wallon and wyndon! Lo, here the wrase of the wede || that I was in wondon! (the three dead kings, att. john audelay, c. 1426, lines 98–99)

—and the vision of life still continuing after death and among the dead, not necessarily solely in the sense of the resurrection but in a community of the dead on earth who speak to and concern themselves with the living, it’s just very fun. (afterlives by nancy mandeville caciola is an absolute blast on that front, by the way.) the three dead kings is also structurally complex in a really enjoyable way: it’s not bob-and-wheel (which you see very famously in sir gawain, the little two-word bob and four-line abab wheel at the end of each verse), but the five-line cdccd bit that i’d call a sort of wheel; and then the main body of each stanza has this very fun abababab scheme where the a- and b-words still half-rhyme with each other. from the stanza i quoted above, you get “fynden — fondon — lynden — Londen — byndon — bondon — wyndon — wondon”. i think it plays very well with the meter.

aside from that, i love the imagery of it; it ranges from, like i said, almost comically grotesque—the dead king whose legs are like leeks wrapped in linen, the worms wallowing and winding in the womb (interesting word choice, also)—to this very sere, wintry atmosphere; the last stanza has a half-line about the “red rowys of the day,” the red daylight, that i just love. and i’m a big fan of the way that, kind of like sir gawain in miniature, the three dead kings opens with this celebration of chivalric performance that’s suddenly pulled askew by the intrusion of supernatural—or, like, really, the most natural; what’s more normal than death, or than cyclical renewal?—forces.

the second poem is pearl. (the linked translation is not my favorite; simon armitage has a facing-page one that’s pretty good, but my favorite overall is marie borroff’s (rip), who also did my favorite sir gawain.) i’m going to do my best not to just go on and on about pearl for ages, because this post is already very long, but it’s also, i think, one of my favorite poems, period. its structure is very hard to talk about briefly, because the way that it’s built is integral to its subject. in brief: 101 stanzas, each of 12 lines in abababab-bcbc rhyme, divided into 20 cantos (the 14th canto has 6 stanzas, the rest 5), for a total of 1212 lines. within each canto, the first and last line of each stanza repeat these linking words and phrases (except the first line of each canto, which does so to the final line of the canto preceding, and the final line of the poem, which paraphrases the opening line.) this is all because pearl is in part about heavenly geometry, the square/cube of the heavenly city (12 furlongs on a side, filled with 144,000 maidens) and the circle/sphere of the pearl, and the way that those two shapes are interposed on each other—there’s a lot of structural/behind-the-scenes numerology and geometry to talk about, but like…i won’t right now. it’s also, in the poem itself, something that can’t fully be talked about—

An-under mone so great merwayle No fleschly hert ne myȝt endeure, As quen I blusched upon þat bayle, So ferly þerof watȝ þe fasure. I stod as stylle as dased quayle For ferly of þat frelich fygure, Þat felde I nawþer reste ne trauayle, So watȝ I rauyste wyth glymme pure. For I dar say wyth conciens sure, Hade bodyly burne abiden þat bone, Þaȝ alle clerkeȝ hym hade in cure, His lyf were loste an-under mone. (pearl, “gawain poet,” c. 1370–1390, lines 1081–1092)

briefly—the narrator sees the heavenly city and nearly dies on the spot, only protected by the fact that this is all taking place in a dream-vision. borroff translates a bit of that as:

As a quail that couches, dumb and dazed, I stared on that great symmetry Nor rest nor travail my soul could taste, Pure radiance so had ravished me.

like…i love that. so much of pearl is about mortal and divine perception, about the unknowability of death and the depth of grief and the final breakdown of the consolatio as a literary-philosophical genre, and about the way that the dead who have transcended death and come out the other side are residing because of that transcendence in a fundamentally alien sphere of cognition, marked out by the impossible-to-withstand radiance of the heavenly city.

but what pearl is about-about, it’s generally agreed, is the death of the narrator’s young daughter. she is the pearl who he lost; grieving her, he falls asleep in a garden and has a dream. in this dream, he wakes up in a fantastical garden or forest, divided by a river, and on the other side of that river is a beautiful young woman who identifies herself, and who the narrator identifies, as the “pearl”. the rest of the poem is a back-and-forth between the narrator and the pearl-maiden, which is largely him asking questions and her explaining biblical parables to him. but describing the conversation as that really does it an incalculable disservice, because what it is is, on the one hand, a grieving parent asking these very human, tender questions of his lost child—are you really her? why did you have to go? where are you? are you happy where you are?—while the child offers only these very stern, cold rebukes—þou most abyde þat He schal deme—and abstruse explanations of the parable of the vineyard; and on the other hand, someone who has been made greedy and grasping and willfully uncomprehending in his grief, refusing to understand that the child he lost is happier where she is now, and that she can be happier there, and that he cannot join her before his decreed time. and he’s not at fault for being that way, but he’s thinking in ways that are fundamentally limited by the mortal realm that he can’t yet exit and she’s thinking in ways that are incomprehensible to people who haven’t also undergone the same apocalyptic, in the word’s sense of “unveiling” (but also, i mean, she’s in the heavenly city), reorientation of thought and being. it’s a very tender poem that i think also manages to prefigure some of the staples of eldritch horror.

and i love how the structure plays into that; the alliteration is looser than the three dead kings—there’s basically no caesura (the || that shows up sometimes in three dead kings and is more or less mandatory in old english verse), and sometimes there’s only 2 alliterations to a line, because the lines are shorter, or none at all—but it’s still got these wonderful repetitions of sound across the stanzas, tied into the repetition of the key words at the beginning and end. the whole thing builds up and up and then collapses back onto the beginning, as the narrator gradually believes he’s understanding more and more and then, in his attempt to ford the river before his time, is thrown back into the mortal world; the poem’s like an impossible staircase. it’s this massive crystalline structure enclosing a deeply human core. there is, to my knowledge, nothing else like it. it—and the other works, including sir gawain, attributed to the “gawain poet” on the basis of stylistic similarities—survives in a single manuscript, cotton nero a.x, which fortunately survived the ashburnham house fire in 1731.

to close off on the alliterative revival at large, it fell out of fashion over the 1400s; in england, the chaucerian tradition—end-rhymed iambic pentameter—dominated, and while alliterative-meter poetry still had some currency in the scottish court that ended with james vi/i stuart’s ascent to the english throne and transfer of his court to london. in modern usage, alliteration as its own technique does crop up in poetry—and i’m always happy to see it—but alliterative meter (as in, four-stress lines, or even the looser form of sir gawain or the three dead kings) is much less common and most people encounter it either through translations of beowulf or through some of the poetry in the lord of the rings (from dark dunharrow  ||  in the dim of morning…)

[spamzineglasgow]

(SPAM Cuts) ‘Apple in Water’ by Mary Ruefle

In this SPAM Cut, Maria Sledmere plunges into the ‘languid swim’ of Mary Ruefle’s poem ‘Apple in Water’ (Mal Journal, January 2019), coming up for air with wedges of theory and the bittersweet taste of something eerie...

> Recently, I was lucky enough to tune into the radio and catch the honeyed tones of Richard Scott reciting Mary Ruefle’s poem ‘Provenance’ on wholesome weekly r4 poetry show, Poetry Please. I found myself lingering over a particular stanza, listening back to the recording later:

And so I have had to deal with wild intractable people all my days and have been led astray in a world of shattered moonlight and beasts and trees where no one ever even curtsies anymore or has an understudy

Vividly, these ‘intractable people’ reel out like a startling till roll of personalities. It feels almost accidentally cinematic. Ruefle unravels her lines with minimal punctuation, and yet the care is exquisite: one internal rhyme or assonant slant sequins the next at just the glinting moment (days/astray, world/curtsies). She gathers you in with that and: ‘And so I have had to deal’, she implicates you as the patient listener. Here are the threads of a woven story, taut enough to hold these marvellous abstractions of broken moonlight, ‘beasts and trees’. The lament for an era of lost manners, the little details, things we dwell upon to end up thus in awe, a kind of canny twist of daily sublime: ‘I love being alive’.

> Hearing Ruefle on the radio, as it were, lured me back into that beautiful world of hers: a world of erasures, miniatures; the kind of eccentric collages we make before teenage hormones steal our attention to sweetness. Yet Ruefle’s approach can hardly be dismissed as twee: she makes ruthless, esteemed cuts of her source text; she’s content to let us hang between clauses, a narrative condensed in three words, ‘Now run along’. Her erasures are silences, revealing as much as they conceal in what is left behind.

> It was my pleasure to discover four new poems of Ruefle’s in Mal Journal’s latest issue. My favourite of the quartet is ‘Apple in Water’. Partly because of my love for ruddy cheeks, the sharp pre-adolescent bite of Laurie Lee’s Cider with Rosie; partly because of the lines like tiny leaves unfurling. Partly because clarity is a favourite word of mine, and it has that delicious assonance with apple. Partly because this is a communion between the speaker and water, between the speaker and the water and the apple, the shreds of the apple, between the speaker and the water and the shreds and, finally, the idea of the apple. I like poems with philosophical dialogues, folded inside them like fortunes in cookies.

> ‘Apple in Water’ is a poem which hedges. You can’t be entirely sure what’s happening, it’s got the laconic delivery of someone dangling before you a story whose banality invites intrigue. Very quickly we realise this isn’t just a poem about remembering a nostalgic swim ‘with the taste of apple / in my mouth’. The water and the tooth-stuck shred of the apple start to speak, warning Ruefle: ‘It doesn’t get any better than this’ and ‘These are troubled times’. My image of Ruefle’s speaker plunging into infinite Hockney-esque blue on a warm suburban afternoon is disrupted by this eerie dialogue. In The Weird and the Eerie (2016), Mark Fisher defines the eerie as ‘constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence’. In speaking, the apple becomes discursively ‘present’ when it should be absent, an inanimate object; in then disappearing (‘the apple / wasn’t really there’), the apple comprises a failure of presence. We can’t take for granted this particular fruit.

> Letting the apple speak is an act of anamnesis: it calls forth from memory the trace, the ‘shred’ of a scene that is filtered through reflective cynicism, the warning against rose-tinting history, ‘These are troubled times’. It’s unclear whether the shred is referring to the now of the poem or the now of the swim. In the poem, we experience a liquid time of between.  We confront the eeriness of poiesis itself. Proust’s madeleine scene is reincarnated as a memory-bi(y)te that speaks back, so maybe you could call this a sort of object-oriented poetics, wrapped up in lyric.  

> Yet this particular apple, the apple of ‘Apple in Water’, is actually a very Derridean fruit: the trace of the ‘earlier’ apple, an apple which Ruefle describes as punctuation — ‘the pretty crimson dot’ marks an aporia upon the line. ‘Apple in Water’ makes me think about what a poem does in holding those truths of memory’s echo, the fade between inscriptions that happens when we try to summon The Event and end up with a kind of lossy compression, a resolution or taste that could never be as sharp as the first. There is always an apple falling out of the poem and into your mouth as you read, filling the space of your speech with black noise (which Graham Harman defines as ‘muffled objects hovering at the fringes of our attention’, something of ‘the clouds of qualities surrounding [...] an object’). This black noise is the apple’s data, perhaps, its colour and scent: its tangential, aesthetic existence in time.

> And so against the babble of the apple and the water (‘the great slipping glimpser’, whose implied vision is also pretty eerie), what the speaker bears instead is a ‘silence / in my mouth’. This silence is the crispness and crackle and lyric chatter of what happens forever and ever in text when you enter it, the chiasmic loops of poetic memory: ‘not knowing if I heard / a night of love / or a love of night’.  The night is so full of black noise we can’t speak. The apple is the understudy for the apple, and neither are making a clear appearance.

> Of course, the apple is what ruined paradise: Eve’s bite of forbidden knowledge collapsed that Edenic scenery into the ‘intractable’ wilderness of human history. Beautifully, Ruefle’s poem bundles itself neatly with a wry recognition, yet lets things slip. The ‘knowledge gained / during that long languid swim’ is hardly a rational ‘enlightenment’, but instead the recognition of slippage, uncertainty as states of being. We might supplant the apple itself for a love: a love that relates metonymically to a person, a mood, a time of season; a love that just is the love of the love of the love of itself. And so the poem itself is a trace, the slender ‘shred’ of the original ‘long languid swim’, which itself eludes in the stripped, opening constative statement: ‘I was swimming’. We aren’t provided with luxurious images of water or the feel of a body buoyed within it; but we can still luxuriate in the undulating curls of Ruefle’s lines, in the absent-present taste of the apple, which is surely the taste of this poetry, whose sweetness is stolen by those coy, tart moments of withholding: eerie taste of a sourness left in the mouth, affecting speech.

~

Text: Maria Sledmere

Image: Kay Lenze